But self-laceration is the stock-in-trade of the 1960s liberal Christian tradition, and Rev is its fifth gospel. The priest character is full of doubt, constantly questioning his vocation, reluctant to preach about sin and contemptuous of those who do (evangelicals are portrayed, inevitably, as gurning bigots). It’s never entirely clear why he wants to be a priest at all. Except, perhaps, to be nice to those who undoubtedly need it. Rev imagines Christians to be social workers in dog collars: faith is far less important than acts of kindness. Which is all very nice, but hardly conducive to filling the pews. If the church only ever gives, then people will only ever take from it. What’s the point of committing oneself to a faith that asks nothing in return – including firm belief?

Giles Fraser makes a similar point in an article that is worth meditating upon. It’s a critique of David Cameron’s recent “coming out” as a Christian, in which the PM spoke of Jesus as a bloody nice bloke and Christianity as being primarily about helping people in need. Fraser calls this the “religion of good deeds” and notes that while it is all jolly decent, it misses a couple of crucial points about Christianity. First, Jesus was not just all about being kind:

no-one was ever crucified for kindness. Jesus was not strung up on a hideous Roman instrument of torture because of his good deeds. If Jesus is just a remarkably good person whose example we ought to follow, why the need for the dark and difficult story of betrayal, death and resurrection that Christians will commemorate this week?

Why indeed? Because it’s a reminder of the fact that Jesus was the son of God who lived, died and rose again. And the second thing that Rev and Cameron miss is that Christians do nice things not just because they are nice people but because they are commanded to by scripture. Helping the poor or the sick is not simply an act of humanity, it’s an act of faith. It’s also an act of witness – a way of showing the world the reality of Christ’s love in the hope that more people will accept him as their saviour. "Witness" is what martyr literally translates as from the ancient Greek. The saints were willingly crucified, shot, tortured, burned and guillotined in part as an act of testimony to the Christian faith. Recall the incredible story of José Sánchez del Río, a 14-year old boy who was stabbed and shot by Mexican secularists. He used his final moments of life to draw a cross in the sand. Now that is faith in action.

For Christians, love is a multifaceted thing. It’s about giving, it’s about sacrificing. And it’s an act of love to tell people when they’re going wrong. Nice atheists don’t have to do that because there’s no commandment to rescue others from themselves. But we have to – and we need to do more of it. Christians should speak out against the greed of payday loan companies that manipulate people’s desperation. Against theft from the taxpayer or the political decisions that leave the disabled or children without adequate support. Against regimes that torture and against mobs that pick on minorities. Against the tide of pornography that degrades the personhood of women. Against abortion-on-demand and against an unfair society that compels so many women to seek it. Against the decline of religious tolerance as so many countries seem determined to squeeze all faith out of the public sphere. We think we are so civilised here in the West, but by Christ’s standards we are savages. Christians who fail to point out these sins are surely as culpable as the people who commit them. It is not enough to be “nice”. Sometimes nice tips over into blind tolerance; a virtue becomes a vice.

Challenging thoughts, maybe, but this is a challenging time of year. This Holy Week, we have to contemplate directly a moment when a religious leader challenged the ethics of his society and was nailed to a cross for his courage. The good news is that he came back from the dead to build a new church. We mere mortals, on the other hand, only have one life to make a difference in. Let’s not just spend it being “nice” to people. Let’s shake things up a bit.